Canada - The team at Onedot designed the lighting rig for Fuego Fuego, Canada’s largest Latin Music festival.
Held at Montreal’s Parc Olympique, the two-day event featured an impressive list of stars, including Maluma and Rauw Alejandro. The Onedot team’s goal was to put together a rig that was versatile enough to express the style of each artist. To do so, they had to summon their creative powers to overcome the limitations posed by their stage.
“The stage brought a good deal of challenges regarding limited rigging loads, rigging trims and wind bracing,” said Jean-Sebastien Guilmette of Onedot. “With a total trim height of 28ft, we had to be very conscious of every inch of the stage, and needed to ensure that small details were taken into account.”
Original thinking helped Guilmette and lighting director Louis-Xavier Bonneau come up with innovations that defied the limitations of their stage. A good example could be seen in their 42ft wide upstage video wall, which they arranged in three horizontal strips.
“Regarding the video wall - in festival conditions, the challenge is to always accommodate the needs of a maximum number of different artists,” said Guilmette. “Almost every festival inevitably ends up with a full backwall. What we aimed to offer with this design was a versatile surface for content that would not limit the touring acts, but that also provided a creative touch.”
The Onedot team also devised a way to use side lighting to mask the stage’s hydraulics. “The hydraulics always show up in festival photos, and they are not very appealing visually,” said Guilmette. “The ladders with the side lighting obstructed the view of the hydraulics.”
With space on the rig at a premium, the design team wanted to include powerful features that had a good output to size ratio, as well as those that could perform many functions. This led to the Chauvet Professional Color Strike M.
“The Color Strike M is one of our go-to multi-use fixtures for festivals,” said Guilmette. “We use it as colour wash and a powerful strobe, in addition to relying on it for creating eye-candy pixel effects. Being an IP fixture makes it well-suited for outdoor use.”
Taking advantage of the Color Strike M’s versatility, the Onedot design team positioned the motorised strobe throughout their rig, using it to accent intense passionate points by covering the stage in bold white light one moment, then evoking a range of different moods with rich colour washes the next. Additionally, a line of Color Strike M units lining the downstage rim played off against pyro effects to create memorable visuals throughout the show.
Some of the artists brought their own LDs to the festival, while others were lit by the Onedot team. “The whole team has a lot of experience on scaffold and mobile stages. Over the years we developed a good workflow,” said Guilmette, who noted that this rig design proved to be so successful that it was used the following weekend for the L’Appel Montréal festival, which was headlined by the band Half Moon Run.
